4:48 Psychosis

by Sarah Kane

 

Directed by Michael Smulik

 

Dialog im Dunkeln

8. April 2014 Premiere, 8pm
Further performances

9. & 10. April, 8pm

 

Freyung 6, 1010 Wien
Tel.: 069912127679
ticket4.48@gmail.com
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​Starring: Joanna Godwin-Seidl, Almut Mölk and Phil Moran

 

Kane’s dramatic masterpiece about what it means to suffer from clinical depression and be terrorised by the voices in your own mind. Placing this unique play in one of the oldest and most fascinating locations in Vienna, the vaulted halls beneath the Freyung. A work of theatre art directed by 2 times Nestroy Prize winner Michael Smulik.

 

 

Stage Manager: Eva Drnek

Asst.: Kathrin Firlinger

Tech. light/sound: Patrick Schmidt

Film: FFAB/Phil Moran

Producers: vienna theatre project & Theatercouch
Production: vienna theatre project/

PR/Sponsoring: Christina Koeppl

Production: Silke Müllner

 

PR Design: Gernot Ottowitz

Photos: Ine Gundersveen

 

Sponsored by: Dialog im Dunkeln and Theatercouch
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About the Play

 

- I won't be able to think. I won't be able to work.

- Nothing will interfere with your work like suicide.

(Silence)

- I dreamt that I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live. I'd been sitting in the fucking waiting room for half an hour.

(A long silence)

- Okay, let's do it, let's do the drugs,

let's do the chemical lobotomy....Let's do it.

 

Central Theme and Reception

 

The play's main subject is clinical depression, a disorder from which Kane suffered. She killed herself after writing the play, before its initial performance. Rather than claiming that it tries to cover depression as a whole, it might be fairer on the text to say that it is a very subjective presentation of depression, giving the audience an insight into one particular case (or perhaps providing specifics on several individual cases). Contemplation and discussion of suicide are prominent and while there is no strict narrative or timeline, certain issues and events are clearly dealt with: deciding whether to take medication to treat depression, the desires of the depressed mind, the effects and effectiveness of medication, self-harm, suicide and the possible causes of depression. Other themes that run throughout the script, in addition to depression, are those of isolation, dependency, relationships, and love.

 

4.48 Psychosis is composed of twenty-four sections which have no specified setting, stage directions or characters. Its language varies between the naturalistic and the highly abstract or poetic, an extension of the style which Kane had developed in Crave, where she had begun significantly to marry form and content. Certain images are repeated within the script, particularly that of "hatch opens, stark light"; a repeated motif in the play is "serial sevens" which involves counting down from one hundred by sevens, a bedside test often used by psychiatrists to test for loss of concentration or memory.
 

 

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